I’m sitting on the couch watching a movie and all I want is for my french bulldog to cuddle up next to me. And as she looks at me with that adorable face from the floor I can’t help but to pick her up and bring her on the couch. The problem is as soon as I pick her up and bring her up onto the couch she goes to the exact opposite side of the couch and lays down. It’s as if she just wants to be next to me all the time but never cuddled up to me or touching me. It’s the same at night when she sleeps with us, she needs to be on the bed or wherever we are but once she is by us, she reverts to her own little corner as far away from us as possible. I wonder where my little cuddle bug has gone, when we first got Tink all she wanted to do was cuddle, she was so cuddly James was worried we weren’t going to have an active frenchie, boy was he wrong!
In my opinion, Tink is too spoiled and she has begun to think we are her servants and we are living in her house and sleeping in her bed. She is so cute it’s hard not to wanna just pick her up and squeeze her and give her a million kisses and tons of attention. But, I believe this attention has started to get to her head.
James has been reading an article referring to the Alpha dog and Tink definitely has a lot of traits that this article talks about. James said ‘French bulldog puppy boot camp starts today‘…..
When it came time to leave Tink home alone, it was extremely hard for us to do. She’ll cry and sometimes try to squeeze herself through the door. Sometimes while standing outside the door, we’ll listen through it and hear her screaming and scratching because we were leaving her alone.
So we decided that every time right before we left her alone, we would give her a meal to distract her. This worked really well for a couple days. But, then she caught on to us. But it gets worst. Now every time we give her a meal, she thinks we are about to leave and she doesn’t even want to think about the food. She stays furthest away from her bowl as possible and follows us around the house and sometimes waits infront of the door.
No matter what, it seems like we make crazy decisions for Tink’s food life. During meals we would have to stay in the room with her and encourage her to eat. We’ll rub her back sometimes and say “good Tinky, yaaay!, good girl., mmm, food good”.
Right now, she’s back to putting her head in the plate before it hits the ground. But, the second we walk away, it better be to get comfortable on the couch.
We ran into a little problem for this week’s frenchie friday feature. It was mostly a timing thing but we also don’t have enough frenchies to feature every Friday. While deciding what to write about, I thought about French bulldogs that need love.
We were so caught up in our frenchie and finding owners that love their frenchies as much as we do, that we never thought about how many frenchies there are in this country that need some love. Furthermore, we never thought about the people out there looking for that perfect French bulldog to love/save.
For those of you looking for that perfect frenchie, consider a rescue one. A lot of the times foster frenchies show more love and companionship than a dog that you raise yourself. Some of these dogs have had tough lives and when showed that their are actually places in this world where they can have a pillow or even a dog bowl really does go a long way with them. They really appreciate it.
Here’s what a friend of ours told us.
“Harley was rescued from puppy mill and lived a tough life…. But it feels good to know that I brought that big ‘ole smile to his face. He is so loyal, listens, and you can tell he appreciates his new life.”
Just visit the French Bulldog Rescue Network’s website and read a couple French bulldog stories, I’m sure you will be touched. I certainly was.
After a couple weeks and several brands of food, we finally found a food our Frenchie Tink will eat. We have tried various brands of dry dog food and she refused to eat most of them, or was excited at first but then stopped eating it. She even started to be picky with wet food and we thought we were never going to find a food to her liking. As for the dry food, she would eat the wet off the kibbles and spit the kibbles out every time. After talking to a few pet store employees as well as other frenchie owners, we learned that it could be the texture of the kibbles and the sensitivity of her little puppy jaws. How could we expect Tink to go from the milky texture of mommy’s milk straight to dry rugged texture of kibbles? Or could we? Tinky was fine with dry kibbles and she was eating them at the breeder’s house until she experienced wet food. She was fine with Nutro Max, but we know how that goes. She liked Avoderm, but it contains iffy avocados and very little protein.
We heard of this brand called Orijen on the internet several times. I checked out the site and next thing you know I was calling Noah’s Ark to ask them if they had any Orijen Puppy in stock, they sure did. We introduced it to Tink as a treat. She gobbled it down without thinking if it was food or not. Then we put a few on a plate to see what she thought about the new food. She liked it, even though it was completely dry.
At this time Tink was pretty much only eating Avoderm wet. So we had to gradually switch to all dry. We actually tried dry a couple times and she still prefers it with some wet food. If we didn’t let her be spoiled, I’m sure she would love Orijen alone. We wanted to find a wet food to switch to because we were over Avoderm and I was scared about the possible effects of Avocados. We did a little more research and decided to try out Nature’s Variety Instinct. Tink loves the chicken, duck & lamb flavors. (We were told that we could switch it up.)
It’s been a full week now with our French bulldog eating Orijen Dry and Instinct Wet. She loves it and we love the fact that she loves it too. Our little Frenchie is so fat now and that makes us VERY happy.